For several years, I've conducted an annual Skype session with the students at Arapahoe High School in Colorado, who read my novel Little Brother as a jumping-off point for a wide-ranging, critical discussion of the Internet and politics. Arapahoe has been much in the news lately, for sad reasons: a student brought a gun to school, shot and wounded two of his fellow students, and then killed himself. Kristin Leclaire teaches Language Arts at Arapahoe, who was living in New York on September 11th, 2001, and she has written a sad, smart, important essay on her experience, called Scar Tissue . My thoughts are with my friends at Arapahoe.

Becky Stern writes, "Last year Hurricane Sandy knocked out a large portion of the power grid in New York City, and I was able to stay online thanks to this rig my friend Hackett made-- it's a deep cycle battery, inverter, and stationary bike trainer with a permanent magnet DC motor and charging circuit. To deal with the lingering trauma of a very real natural disaster, we made a video detailing how it works."

John Robb wants us to stop landscaping our lawns, and start foodscaping them -- growing food for our families. And he thinks the way to jumpstart it is for farmers to make house-calls. I love this idea, but don't think I could participate in it: when we applied to Hackney Council in London for permission to add a greenhouse frame to our balcony they rejected it because it would "interrupt the vertical rhythm" of our building. As far as I can tell, "vertical rhythm" is an imaginary aesthetic quality that is more important than real food.

Of course, since most people in the developed world don’t know how to grow food anymore and many of the methods and tools used to grow high quality food are still being developed, we are going to need to some help.

One great way to do that is to join a local foodscaping program.

This type of program is like a food subscription at a CSA. However, in this program, the farmer comes to you. He/she converts your yard into a high performance garden and teaches you how to garden it successfully.

I think that if we are smart, we’ll be spending more money on foodscaping in ten years than landscaping. If so, good food will be available everywhere.

Tristan from Open Source Ecology sez, "This comprehensive, user friendly video shows you how to assemble the Powercube; Open Source Ecology's modular power unit. This machine can be used to Power any of the 50 Global Village Construction set machines, including the Liberator CEB Press." (See today's earlier post on the CEB Press).

Tristan from Open Source Ecology sez, "This comprehensive, user friendly video shows you how to assembly the Liberator CEB Press; the worlds first open source, automated compressed earth brick making machine. Made from $4000 worth of parts, this machine sets a new standard in affordability, allowing users to build almost any type of brick structure out of dirt."